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Zombie Apocalypse
Assessing the situation
Contingency plans for the inevitable zombie apocalypse (called Z-Day) are substantially more challenging than those needed for tornadoes, fires, ice storms and routine power outages. Each of these more routine disasters is fairly easily categorized. A 1950 F4 tornado is pretty similar to the 2009 variety.
The zombie menace has been in a state of constant flux since its discovery in 1968 by George Romero. Therefore, a quick assessment of the exact nature of the zombies on your particular Z-Day is critically important.
Earlier zombie outbreaks (1960 – 2002)
Early zombies were poorly-equipped to overrun civilization. Besides having virtually no intelligence to speak of, they were slow, so slow. Unless you were tied down or hindered by lugging around injured people, you could get away from them just by walking fast. The 1960 zombie would be easily dispatched in our high-technology, wireless world.
In 2002, the zombie menace was transformed. The film 28 Days Later heralded a zombie better suited to destroy our faster-paced civilization. Today’s zombies are frenzied with the speed of an athlete and apparently never-ending energy reserves.
While zombies have advanced, human preparedness unfortunately, has not. With dozens of well-documented zombie outbreaks, each human should be able to immediately recognize the warning signs of impending doom. Yet, with each outbreak mankind acts as if it has never seen a zombie. By now, any time we see someone hunched over a corpse with ragged clothes, the first thing we think should be “Hey, is that a zombie?” rather than walking up to ask the guy if he’s feeling ok. Time after time, we watch the Z-Day survivors trying to figure out what’s going on as their world crumbles around them.
Perhaps the greatest difference between a Zombie apocalypse and other catastrophic events is that during a normal disaster, the victims aren’t trying to eat you. This creates a completely new risk vector during the outbreak, as the populace tries to deal with fires, loss of power, communications and roving hordes of flesh-eaters.
Tying it together
How relevant is Z-Day to corporate disaster planning?
One of the most consistent elements of every zombie outbreak since 1968 is the sense of helpless frustration we all feel as we watch the outbreak creep past containment. Invariably, human preparations and responses are unable to contain the outbreak and prevent worldwide catastrophe. Perhaps successive survivor’s inability to learn from past outbreaks prevents any form of solid contingency planning.
If zombies were, in fact, real we would have learned how to destroy them and prevent sneak attacks long ago and would have developed measures that we could easily call upon to contain them. We would have done that don’t you think?
Well maybe we wouldn’t.
After all, we’ve all seen tornadoes destroy other businesses, even hospitals, and yet most organizations fail to develop contingency plans for those. Not to mention, fires, floods, power outages or HVAC failures. Aren’t these organizations choosing to react in a panic rather than taking precautions to ensure survival?
So next time you’re watching a zombie movie and feeling that frustration as you watch mistakes pile on top of each other with small problems cascading into Armageddon, you might do well to remember that feeling on Monday morning.
Have you spent time with your disaster plan today?
Additional (random) Z-Day notes
We should expect a reasonable overlap between preparations for Z-Day and those needed for higher probability disasters such as Swine Flu outbreaks. Both are infection-driven with similar contagion elements. Didn’t we feel a little of the same fear when officials announced that it was too late to close United States' borders to prevent the spread of Swine Flu that we’ve felt in theaters watching the stray zombie crawling around the barricade?
Zombies always attack the living. They seem to lose interest in dead people very quickly. There’s really never an explanation for how a zombie knows. Bears have similar disinterest for dead prey. Unlike a bear attack however, there seems to be no evidence of anyone pretending to be dead to successfully avoid an attack. Feigning death is probably not a good strategy.
This leads to a discussion of zombie senses. The Zombie’s senses are actually one of the single most significant factors in survivability. You want the kind of zombies that have human (or lower) ability to smell, hear and see. If zombies have an increased sense of smell, you will not be able to simply go hide in the mountains away from people, because some stray zombie is going to sniff you out. There doesn’t seem to be much attention to this detail, however the ineffectiveness of the “play dead” technique definitely suggests an enhanced sense of smell.
Related articles
How to survive a zombie attack
This very funny article provides interesting insights into zombie survival. This site is not affiliated with the
Disaster Task Force.
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